Amazon Echo & REDHAWK

Following up our video demonstrating REDHAWK on the Ettus E310, we’ve decided to create a fun demo utilizing an Amazon Echo to perform command and control of our cognitive radio application.

To start, the REDHAWK Test skill was defined using the Alexa Skills Kit. For now, the skill allows users to launch a waveform, set property values, and release the waveform. Once the interface was defined, a server with a self-signed certificate was set up and given a fully qualified domain name, allowing the Alexa service to reach it.

Once the server was able to receive the Alexa JSON data via an HTTP POST, it was necessary to interface with a REDHAWK domain. Rather than worrying about configuring CORBA to work across the internet, a simplified model of the REDHAWK sandbox was built upon a Tornado HTTP client. This could then be pointed to one of our work computers which was running both REDHAWK and the rest-python server, enabling command and control.

From there, minimal changes were made to the cognitive radio application to allow the configuration to be set with a survey profile, such as “WiFi” or “Zigbee”. This enabled setting multiple properties with one Alexa command, as opposed to tediously configuring them one at a time.

Be sure to check out the video:

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